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Celebrating a Decade of Success

Soundmark Wealth Management reaches a significant milestone this year, celebrating their 10-year anniversary of working together with their clients to achieve financial and lifetime goals.


The foundation of the firm, however, had its beginning eight years prior to that, in 2000, when John Buller, Todd Flynn, and Bill Schultheis connected, collaborated, and concluded there had to be a better way of defining wealth management.

This “better way” has turned into a revolution within the financial industry, led not by Soundmark Wealth Management, but by our clients and other investors across the country who embrace a common-sense approach to wealth management; one that is not based on top-performing stocks, but on the financial, emotional and physical well-being found within a comprehensive financial plan.

The Beginning

For the first 15 years of his professional career, Bill Schultheis worked at a major Wall Street firm and witnessed its obsession with trying to pick the top performing stocks, industries, and trends. After exiting the industry in 1996, he went on to write The Coffeehouse Investor – How to Build Wealth, Ignore Wall Street and Get On with Your Life, a book that highlights the wisdom of capturing market returns through index and passively-managed mutual funds.

His work was initially featured in a regional newspaper column, and he soon found himself connecting with more and more investors who sought guidance in integrating his concepts into their portfolios and lives.

Maybe it was luck or maybe it was fate, but Bill’s initial client meetings were carried out in the conference room of a local CPA firm that included two business partners, John Buller and Todd Flynn.

For the first 12 years of their professional careers, John and Todd, working in the capacity of CPAs, witnessed Wall Street’s same obsession with trading stock portfolios. In preparing clients’ tax returns, John and Todd were driven to highlight the negative impact of taxation on portfolio returns. They also made it a habit of probing deeper into their clients’ estate planning and insurance protection issues, as well as projecting out the sustainability of portfolios after retirement. What they found was a complete disconnect between their clients’ portfolios, financial risk, and lifetime goals.

Portfolios, Risks, and Goals 

In 2008 John, Todd, and Bill established Soundmark Wealth Management to deliver a financial planning approach to investors that addressed all aspects of wealth management. Ironically, that was the same year stocks around the globe suffered their steepest decline since the Great Depression. In reflecting on their time of working together, especially during the build-out of their new office during the market meltdown, 2008 had to be one of the most challenging investment climates of the last quarter century for both their clients and crew at Soundmark. But in terms of solidifying what had been a fledgling revolution, 2008 has been the most gratifying of the past 18 years, as it allowed Soundmark to experience the resiliency of its clients to stay the course, due to their long-standing use of appropriate risk parameters (portfolios allocations) that reflected their lifetime goals and objectives.

Our Inspiration

One of the reasons the firm is so relentless in sharing this revolution with you is because they are energized by people who are tuned in to their own passions, ultimately allowing them to get on with their lives.

These are the people who realize that fulfillment in life comes not from the size of a bank account, but from the energy put forth pursuing things that give meaning to their existence. They inspire the Soundmark team to do the same. Soundmark thanks you for sharing in this journey with them, and they look forward to a fruitful future together.


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